Tethered Objects

...an attempt at a couple of thermo-acoustic oscillators. I didn't manage to get these tuned properly, so there's no sound to accompany the photos. But I will. They were produced for 'Works with sunlight' at Meantime Arts in Cheltenham earlier in the year, and require a decent amount of sunlight, so they'll remain silent until next summer I should think...

Light Traps

It's all been done before in all sorts of ways you know - by the structuralist/materialist film makers in the '70's, people like Guy Sherwin and Liz Rhodes (not that I'd compare myself to them of course), and using video, the Vasulkas amongst others. Nonetheless, it can be satisfying to discover you've made a video that has the camera in it as an explicit and essential ingredient.
I was attempting to synthesize some audio by pumping it through an LED, and then burning some wood to produce smoke and heat-haze noise in the sonified signal (see a much earlier post below). Of course, there was a breeze and it just drifted either onto me, or in fact anywhere but in between the LED and the lens. But then I noticed this as I was fiddling with the tripod...interference patterns generated by the high speed flicker of the LED heterodyning with the scan rate of the CCD chip in the camera. At least that's the best explanation I can come up with. I ought to (will) try this with a few different cameras, and eventually come up with an installation.

The audio being pumped is itself from light signals - emanations from a shop window on Regent Street (I forget which), which rather oddly, was covered in lacewings...

Two Machines: 1 - The ANS

Of all of the one-off electronic musical instruments I've seen (either in the flesh, or photographed), the ANS is simply the most beautiful. It's now resident in the Glinka Museum in Moscow, probably for good, and when I made some recordings on it recently, needed considerable maintenance work - the lowest tonewheel is out of action and there is a lot of 100Hz bleeding into the audio. Stanislav Kreitchi (who has looked after the machine for many years) tells me he'll get it up and running properly - but I don't think even he can solve the small matter of the Velvet Rope...














Apologies for the phone camera. Sadly it was all I had with me...

'Glitter Path' 2

Same time during the day, same place as the audio recording below. This time, I used the camera's external mic input, and the pre-amp is less flexible - hence the heavy compression. Fairly rough conditions...still not lucky enough for dead calm and sun...



Loud, and on headphones please.

Back-Chat

Another one from the archive. Here we have a krypton mini-bulb wired up to the speaker terminals of an old bang & olufsen amplifier circa 1970-ish (an old family heirloom, which is why i treat it so carefully).

The source material is F.M radio, and the gating/distortion/ring modulation is probably due to the amp not liking what it's seeing with the bulb - wildly differing impedance according to whether it's lit or not - and the bulb trying its best to keep up with the amp's complaints. Also, i'm guessing that since the power output from the bulb can't go into the negative (ie, suck light in), all of the negative signal gets mixed in with the positive, hence the ring-modulator sound. I like to think of it as a sort of audio-visual amp/speaker altercation...

(Reverb and compression added)